I am a Burmese exile taking a near-permanent refuge in New York and Sydney. Here are my essays about Burma and anything else I feel like writing about. And posting the articles I like from selected sites. Bridging Burma to the world this Blog is more of a Politically-Oriented Literary Blog than a Plain News Blog or a Sophisticated Thoughts Blog.

Sunday, September 20, 2015

The Scourge of Burma - Part 1

Rangoon's Old India Town.

April 1972 and it was last
Sunday before Thin-Gyan water festivals when I found the dead boy.

He was slumping lifeless in
the dark staircase to the upper floors of the apartment building next door from
our shop house. He was a bad boy from our neighbourhood and I was the first one
to notice the body.

The blood-filled plastic
syringe he used to inject heroin was still horribly stuck in his left forearm.
Bubbly froth was slowly dripping from the corner of his gaping mouth but the
twisted face still bore the last agonizing minutes just before his death. Heroin
overdoses were common in our neighbourhood but I had never seen one before. It
was ugly.

Downtown Rangoon then was
just combined Chinatown and Indian Town and we were in the centre of the
latter. Burmese then lived in poor townships without centralized sewage system
and water supply on the outskirts of Rangoon. Our neighbourhood used to be a large
Indian enclave and the thriving commercial centre before the 1962 coup.

After the coup, as a part of
large-scale nationalisation, the army took over all the business properties
owned by the Indians and distributed the loot free among the officers and some soldiers.
That’s how a large number of Burmese families like ours came to own the prime
real estate in the Rangoon CBD. Courtesy of General Ne Win and his nationalist army.

Burmanization had just started
from the very middle of Rangoon. It still had a very long way to go yet.

My father and his father were
former army officers and we both ended up in same neighbourhood by the
intersection of Dalhousie Road and Mogul Street, the gold and gem trading area in
Rangoon. They had a large family and his father sort of abandoned them after
taking a much younger woman as second wife. He dropped out of high school, became
an addict and a small time dealer, and now he was dead at 15.

Everybody called it No.4, the
Bein-Phyu (white opium) or pure heroin was cheaply available on the streets of
Rangoon. That dead boy even told me how easy to get hold of a kilo-brick of
Double UOGlobe Brand 100% pure heroin from the Chinese dealers and make money reselling
it in small bags to the addicts coming from the townships.

As an obvious result so many
boys my age quickly became addicts. The damages to their families were
alarmingly visible the socialist government started jailing the dealers,
hanging the traffickers, and sending the young addicts to hard labour camps in
the rural areas.

I have a built-in aversion to
the drugs and I don’t even inhale a single cigarette smoke in my life. But one
of my younger brothers became addicted to heroin and my parents had to send him
back to our delta town and kept him there for years away from the drugs till he
was weaned.

I passed Matriculation that
year and got into the Rangoon Institute of Technology. But I grew up in an army boarding school and
the Defence Services Academy (DSA) was my dream as most my classmates. But my
father was against me joining the army. Too many army officers were killed on
the front and he didn’t want to lose his eldest boy. But I was mad and I was so
unhappy at the RIT, I finally ran away and tried to join the army in Mandalay
as a private.

Boy soldiers

Burmese army always has the
specialized Recruitment Battalions (Su-Zaung-Yays) stationed in the cities and
major towns in proper Burma. From there the recruits are sent to the specialized
Training Battalions (Lay-Kyint-Yays). But they are very strict against
under-aged boys like me. Eighteen was their minimum age requirement and I was
only 16 on my identity card.

But at the heights of civil
war the same army also needed soldiers so bad that they had devised a legal way
of getting child soldiers into the army. Especially where the army needed them
most. On the faraway borderlands where the deadly civil war was raging for many
years like wild fire.

The fighting battalions
stationed in the ethnic lands like Kachin State were allowed to recruit and
train anyone, and conveniently many people living in these highlands do not
have the proper identity cards. So any under-aged boy can show up at one of these
battalions and the recruitment sergeant will take him to the nearest
immigration office and get him a new identity card with a valid date of birth
and a false identity.

That was how I ended up with
a group of boys and young men in a battalion stationed in Myitkyina as
recruits. Our battalion was fighting the KIA (Kachin Independence Army) on Ledo
Road and later the Communists on the border with China. After the three-month boot
camp in Myitkyina I was armed with a German G3 rifle and assigned to one of the
field companies as a brand new boy soldier.

The commander of our
90-strong company was almost 60 years old Kachin captain, who was illiterate
and an English army relic from the Second World War, and my platoon commander
was a 20 years young Burmese lieutenant just out of DSA.

Within 6 months the lieutenant
and a section of ten men were killed by KIA in a single ambush. Our section
leader, a Burmese corporal, stepped on a Chinese-made all-plastic
anti-personnel mine and lost most of his right foot. Later he died of excessive
bleeding in the hammock as we carried him back to the base and I became the
section leader.

I was the youngest of the
nine men section but I was a former uni student, I could read the maps and
interpret the contours and use a compass and find my way around in a thick
jungle, and most important I could kill a man.

Our old captain once said
there were only two types of man, one who could kill and one who could not. He
put me in the first but himself in the second. He added that shooting a man in
the heat of a battle is not killing. He was right though as I had never seen
him kill not even a chicken during my nearly two years in his company. But he
once saw me shooting a wounded prisoner after a successful ambush, and I had to
cut the throats of so many chickens for our meals as other Buddhist soldiers had
refused to do that horrible job. I was not religious at all and I didn’t care
about heaven or hell.

Most Kachin farmers on the
remote hills grow opium and KIA collects a good part of their crop as taxes.
Most poppy fields were in the region called The Triangle between the May-Kha
and May-Li-Kha rivers. Two small rivers converge near Myitkyina forming the
Irrawaddy. Our territory east of the May-Kha was too mountainous and cold for
the poppy growing. But we could still find many a hidden poppy fields if we
ventured far enough from our fortified bases on the Htaw Gaw hills.

And one day I found myself and
my section in the middle of a beautifully flowering poppy-field during a
long-range patrol over the range.

In a poppy field

Burmese soldiers destroying a KIA's poppy filed.

The well-hidden field was in
a narrow valley between a hilly ridge and a high cliff. A shallow stream was
flowing slowly at the base of the cliff. Poppy plants nearly filled the whole
valley. Mostly single upright-stem plants with a single flower right on the top
end of the greenish tubular stems. The red flowers with dark purple bases still
had the papery petals and the small pods were not really visible. The only
Kachin soldier of our section told me the plants were just over a couple of
months old as it takes about 3 months for the fruits or pods to be ready for
milking.

We also found a cluster of
ramshackle lean-tos by the stream. The opium farmers were nowhere to be seen.
They might have seen us approaching and fled into the jungle. Hungry and searching
for food we ransacked the huts. The farmers there grew black sticky rice,
steamed it and made thick round cakes, dried them under the sun, and stored for
later use. Sweet flavour and nice aroma when steamed back, these rice cakes
were our favourite staple. We found plenty of them and also many strips of
boar-jerky but took only half of the stores as we didn’t want the subsistence
farmers to get starved.

We steamed the rice cakes in
our hangaws over the hastily-made fire and ate them with the strips of boar-jerky.
Only after the meal we lined up a few feet apart at the edge of the field and
walked abreast slowly and thoroughly struck the plants down with bamboo sticks.
We did that for a couple of hours managing to destroy about a quarter of the large
field. We were exhausted and so we gave
up and decided to start the long journey back to the base.

Then the hell broke loose as
we were walking back to the stream near the huts to drink and re-fill our
canteens. A bullet whizzed past my head and abruptly dropped the guy walking
behind me just seconds after I heard the first gunshot. I hit the wet ground
and sunk my face into the watery mud on the stream shore. Soon bullets were
flying all over my head and when I looked up I could see the enemy on the top
of the cliff.

The only way out of the
valley was the narrow track on that side of the stream and we were now trapped.
When I looked behind two were lying dead on the ground and other were all
disappearing behind the nearby huts. I managed to crawl back under the cover of
their fire and joined them.

The poppy farmers did run
from us but they knew where the KIA regulars were and came back with them to slaughter
us for destroying their livelihood. We had a long fire-fight there but
eventually they withdrew by the nightfall and let us flee as they were also
just a few. Two of ours dead and we couldn’t even get their bodies back for a
proper burial.

Traffickers

After nearly a year on the
front our company was pulled back to Myitkyina for a two month break. Part of
that R&R was we had to do the week-on and week-off escorting of the daily
Mandalay-Myitkyina train. The train was the only connection between Myitkyina
and the rest of Burma. Plane trips were too expensive and the Irrawaddy there was
too shallow to navigate and there were no roads then.

Daily diesel train left
Myitkyina early morning and the sister train left Mandalay in the evening. They
met somewhere in between and swapped the escorting army units and continued the
journeys. If nothing went wrong both would reach their destinations roughly 24
hours later. KIA was frequently attacking the trains, and so the long rail line
and the train itself had to be heavily guarded.

I reckoned that blue train
might be the longest passenger train in the whole wide world. It needed two
diesel locomotives at the front and another two at the rear end to pull and push
all 60 or 70 odd carriages over the mountainous terrain. A flatbed-car loaded with
tons of heavy steel I-beams was attached to the first locomotive as a heavy pilot
car to detonate the possible KIA mines on the tracks and also to withstand the
explosion and prevent the derailment. The train moved so slow, at some
difficult uphill bends one can walk past it.

Except for the upper-class sleeper
cars, reserved strictly for the army officers and the party and government
officials, every single car was jam-packed with hundreds and hundreds of passengers
and their luggage. All doors were shut tight from inside and the people had to
get in and out through the windows when the train stopped at the stations.

Many passengers were also the
paid-carriers for the rich smugglers as they carried prohibited goods such as heroin
and jade stones to Mandalay and brought the consumer goods like LUX soap-bars
and COLGATE toothpaste-tubes and expensive gold or silver jewellery back to
Myitkyina. Black markets were thriving in the totally-broke economy of
Socialist Burma. Almost everything had to come across the border from Thailand
then and our enemy KNU was thriving on the taxes collected from the smugglers.

And to our surprise the
biggest smuggler of Myitkyina had his carrier girls and their illegal goods in
our armoured escort car well secured all the way to Mandalay and then back to
Myitkyina. The obvious reason was that no police or custom dares to search a
car occupied by a battle-hardened army unit.

The escort car was shielded
both sides and bottom with thick steel plates. The side plates had gun-slits
for our MG3 medium machine guns and inside were two long benches by the walls
for the gunners and the open middle was a space for the rest of us. But a good
part of that space was always occupied by at least four or five young Kachin girls
and their tons of goods. Our Company-Sergeant-Major didn’t say much to us
except that we were paid 5,000 kyats for every trip and the cargo probably was
only the raw jade stones and some gold bars.

Many of us, especially the
Kachin soldiers, knew the heroin bricks were there but didn’t dare to say
anything as the NCOs in our army have a life or death authority over their
charges. And also the money when divided was very good as my monthly salary as
a lance-corporal was only a little over 200 kyats. Sometimes during the long
trips I idly sat beside their goods and wondered what a kilo-brick of that famous
Double UOGlobe Brand heroin looks like. But I never dared to ask our well-feared
CSM or even the girls.

So, one week we were riding
the trains and next week we were drinking expensive Johnny Walker whiskies at
the Chinese restaurants in the town while watching hungrily the girls walking
past and some days having many wild brawls with the local mob. We used to drink
extremely bitter army-rum, heavily laced with quinine to prevent malaria, issued
weekly to us as part of our ration. We were now awash with cash and spending
like hell before going back to the hellish jungles. We thought we were having
an easy time till the day KIA took pot shots at our slow-moving train.

It was our last day on the
train and most were not really looking forward to going back into the jungles
as we hadn’t had any casualty last two months. We used to have at least one
death almost every fortnight. The worst was a Shan corporal from our platoon.
He had fallen for the prettiest one of the heroin carrier-girls. She also fell
for him and the romance blossomed and for the last few trips the two lovebirds always
sat together by the door away from us.

That day was a very wet day
as a heavy rain was pouring down non-stop since the night before. We didn’t
even hear the gunshots as the loud rain had suppressed them. Only when the
bullets started hammering the steel plates of our car we realised we were being
attacked. A KIA unit had slipped through the tight cordon of army patrols and
now they were taking positions at the jungle edge and shooting at our car first
and then the cars behind us. Our MG3 gunners returned fire and within a few
minutes we were out of their gun sights as the train had kept on going.

None got hurt in our car but
I immediately knew that the insides of the cars behind ours would be like a
slaughterhouse as these timber carriages have no protection against the high
velocity bullets. As a usual procedure the train didn’t stop till it reached a
large station where an army unit and a civilian medical team from the local
hospital were waiting.

Crowded Mandalay-Myitkyinar Train.

They evacuated the wounded
first and later the dead and then placed the bodies onto the concrete platform.
There were more than 100 mutilated bodies. I didn’t even know why I counted.
Mostly Kachins, Burmese, Shans, many Chinese, and some Indians, all races and
colours and creeds. Their lives snuffed out on their merry ways to Mandalay.

Then I heard the loud screams
of one girl from the other end of our car. The two lovers were now lying dead
on the floor. The doors of our guard car had no plate covers and a couple of
bullets had pierced through the timber door and terminated the young lives. I
almost wept as the girls started screaming and crying. We had no other choices
but to leave their lifeless bodies among the others on the platform as the
train had to resume the journey after the soldiers hosed down the blood and guts
off the shot-out carriages.

Two days later we were back
on the tragically scenic Htaw Gaw Hills between the May-Kha and the Chinese
border. Soon the Monsoon ended and the enemy was active again as the dry season
approached.

And my section had a scary encounter
with a very large mule train carrying tons of KIA opium from The Triangle to
their heroin labs by the Chinese border.